I tried to write a post, but it's so long that nobody would ever be able to read it. I've had to split it into two massive, unreadable posts, and it doesn't get across even a quarter of it. My MH is shot to pieces. Please don't feel obliged to read it. I've also changed my name, so please don't say if you recognise me.
Mum is 86, with minor cognitive impairment (lifelong, not age-related). I live nearby and help her, along with my sister. Mum can be loving, but is also self-centred, childish and manipulative. When we were children she was generally neglectful, and enabled/excused physical and sexual abuse by family members. Until now, I’ve found helping her to be a healing experience, but lately I’m struggling. I think I’m losing a fiction I’d built of a happy family, being a good girl, looking after Mum ‘as she looked after me’, when really she didn’t.
After an illness last year, Social Services helped us arrange a supported housing place, as even before this she’d only been coping with lots of support from us, and she’s now very unsteady on her feet. She doesn’t like it and wants to live alone, or with one of us. The supported place provides meals, housekeeping and an emergency warden. She has carers for washing and dressing, after many episodes of turning them away and calling us to wash her instead. Dsis and I do the rest (e.g. replenishing toiletries, changing sheets, admin), and visit her daily.
But her demands for transport are breaking us. She can’t drive, or walk outside unsupported, and refuses a frame or stick so it must be a person. She relies on us to take her places. Under normal circumstances this would be fine. But for Mum’s whole life she’s operated entirely on her own terms, with no consideration of others. She doesn’t make arrangements or agree convenient times like other people. Everything is spur of the moment. She won’t make appointments, even with the doctor: just turns up, expecting to be seen. (This works for her, as people usually cave after she’s been there a while.) Now that she’s old, she still wants this spontaneity – but expects us to facilitate it, and gets us to do it by bullying, manipulating, guilt-tripping and outright lying.
When she wants to be taken somewhere she never asks in advance. She just rings, wanting me to come now. Or I might arrive for a different reason, and find her all ready to be taken to the optician’s or wherever. Simple enough with advance notice and an appointment: hours of awkwardness and embarrassment with Mum. Often I have to refuse, because it doesn’t work with something else I have to do. I’ve tried explaining that I’m happy to take her anywhere, as long as she lets me make an appointment, or asks me earlier to be sure that it works for me. I’ve tried ringing or arriving at a regular time each day, asking if there’s anywhere she wants to go. She says there isn’t – and then rings later on, expecting me to arrive. And often I just can’t.
But if I don’t come, she very often sets off walking by herself. She’s been hurt many times after falling in the street. She then displays her injuries and tells everyone she fell when going to buy the paper (or whatever) by herself, ‘because I wouldn’t come’. The supported complex doesn’t provide care and she is free to come and go, so the staff can’t stop her and have no responsibility to watch her. They tell me that one day she’ll be seriously injured.